Polymer Reptation in Disordered Media

Abstract

The effect of ambient disorders and sequence heterogeneities on the reptation of a long polymer is studied with the aid of a disordered tube model. The dynamics of a random heteropolymer is found to be much slower than that of a homopolymer due to collective pinning effects. The asymptotic properties belong to the universality class of a directed path in (1+1)-dimensional random media.Comment: 4 pages, to appear in PRL; text, figures and related (p)reprints also available at http://matisse.ucsd.edu/~hwa/pub.htm